"Should we wake the President?"
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On a Friday evening last January, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the Air Force commander in charge of defending American airspace from foreign intrusion, called President Joe Biden’s top military adviser, Gen. Mark Milley.
U.S. intelligence officials had just notified the general that for roughly 10 days they had been tracking a mysterious — and enormous — object flying over the Asia-Pacific, VanHerck told Milley. The object had crossed into U.S. airspace over Alaska and VanHerck said he planned to dispatch military jets to fly alongside it and assess what it was.
The previously unreported Jan. 27 phone call between Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and VanHerck, the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, set off an eight-day scramble inside the Biden administration. American officials faced an unprecedented challenge: a Chinese spy balloon the size of three school buses flying across the continental U.S.
Administration officials at first hoped to conceal the balloon’s existence from the public, and from Congress, according to multiple former and current administration and congressional officials.
“Before it was spotted publicly, there was the intention to study it and let it pass over and not ever tell anyone about it,” said a former senior U.S. official briefed on the balloon incident.
A senior Biden administration denied that there was an attempt to keep the balloon secret. “To the extent any of this was kept quiet at all, that was in large part to protect intel equities related to finding and tracking” the official said, referring to intelligence gathering on the balloon. “There was no intention to keep this from Congress at any point.”
